"#Yostseason" has come to refer to the surprising success of Royals' manager Ned Yost's unorthodox calls. (Charlie Neibergall/AP)

One of the core joys of the World Series is that it’s everywhere. Anyone watching professional baseball in America, this past week, has been watching a game between the San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals. Everyone watching gets the same impression, at the same moment, of a jagged Hunter Pence swing or a sniping Yordano Ventura fastball. When occasion arises, everyone bellows the same half-in-the-bag truths at the same scrub umpires.

And as the game gets late, everyone watches the same two managers, scouring them for a sign of incompetence or overmatchedness, for a whiff of fatal stubbornness or overdone cleverness, for a misstep that can be announced in the moment, recounted after the game, and pointed to in the next day’s headlines.

Even before the World Series, this October has been a good month for such second-guessers. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Don Mattingly sent Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in baseball, out for the seventh inning in the deciding game of the National League Division Series despite Kershaw’s having started on short rest; within minutes, a two-run lead was a one-run deficit. The St. Louis Cardinals’ Mike Matheny, who escaped the divisional round mostly unscathed, caught his criticism in the National League Championship Series, when he used rusty reliever Michael Wacha to pitch in the ninth inning of a tie game. Wacha surrendered a walk-off homer to the Giants’ Travis Ishikawa, and the St. Louis season was over.

The remaining managers are the Giants’ Bruce Bochy and the Royals’ Ned Yost. Bochy, having managed the Giants to World Series victories is 2010 and 2012, combines postseason pedigree with considerable tactical acumen. His specialty is managing a bullpen, dispensing the correct relievers at the opportune moments. The second game of the Division Series, against the Washington Nationals, reached 18 innings, but Bochy was prepared, having reserved crack long reliever Yusmeiro Petit. Petit pitched six of the extra innings, all scoreless, stringing the Nationals along until San Francisco’s Brandon Belt hit a home run minutes before midnight to break the tie.

Yost, meanwhile, was known before the Royals’ unlikely postseason run as a dullard, and he routinely came under fire for his devotion to the sacrifice bunt, a tactic considered statistically unsound in most cases. Periodically throughout the season, #yosted would circulate on Twitter, signaling the occurrence of some obsolete (and often ineffective) maneuver in keeping with his character. In October, #yostseason has replaced it, intended to recognize both the endurance of his bad habits and their inexplicable working out. In the third game of the World Series, with the Royals leading by one run and with speedster Jerrod Dyson on first in the seventh inning, Yost allowed a pitcher who had never made a professional plate appearance, Kelvin Herrera, to bat. He struck out on three pitches, and Yost ended up removing him just one out into the next half-inning anyway, but no matter: The Royals won, 3-2.

In the days leading up to the Series, analysts speculated about how each manager might impact his team’s chances. Most conclusions gave the Giants an advantage, but many of the smarter ones included the caveat that even the most able manager helps his team only a little, and even the sorriest one hurts his team only so much. Baseball is a game predominantly decided by the players. Live arms and quick bats make most decisions look good; the absence of them leaves the tactician few options.

Still, go anywhere where people are watching this evening’s seventh and deciding game, stay awhile, and there’s a good chance “Yost” or “Bochy”—whoever’s at the helm of the loser—will be the most cursed name by the end of the night. This has something to do with the human need to assign blame and with the easy logic of hierarchy. More fundamentally, though, I think it has to do with baseball’s opacity and basic strangeness. The manager is a martyr to the altar of assurance.  We watch him when it is easier than watching baseball itself.

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The present era of baseball belongs to the general manager, that front-office whiz who spots undervalued commodities, parses out which stars will be worth their money, and scrapes league flotsam into an effective bullpen. The Oakland Athletics’ Billy Beane, of course, gained fame in Moneyball. Theo Epstein was the visionary behind the breaking of the Boston Red Sox curse in the mid-2000s. Andrew Friedman built the Tampa Bay Rays from league laughingstock to perennial contender despite a miniscule payroll, work that attracted the attention of the Dodgers, who just over a week ago hired him away from Tampa.

The rise of the celebrity GM has coincided with the spreading influence of sabermetrics, an umbrella term for the statistical study of baseball that necessarily, as statistics do, privileges the long-term to the short. Now, if a team exceeds expectations, journalists look for the illustrative anecdote not in a rousing midseason speech but in a keen offseason signing. See the third paragraph from last November’s Sports Illustrated piece on Boston’s World Series win: “After shedding $272 million … in a megadeal with the Dodgers in late August 2012, the Sox added a passel of mid-level free agents: Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes and Stephen Drew. Each became a vital contributor while bringing an esprit de corps to a once-tense clubhouse.” If the Giants win tonight, something similar will surely be written about Brian Sabean’s acquisitions of starting pitchers Tim Hudson and Jake Peavy; if it is the Royals, Dayton Moore will get his due for trading for James Shields and Wade Davis.